Articles and Resources

QUOTE: ...the concept of preventive detention is at the very boundary of American law, and legal experts say any new plan for the imprisonment of terrorism suspects without trial would seem inevitably bound for the Supreme Court.

QUOTE: While Mr. Obama has promised to get rid of the 16-year-old policy that allows gay men and lesbians to serve only if they keep their sexual orientation secret, Mr. Gates has said that both he and the president want to push the issue “down the road a bit.”

QUOTE: The central question before the [Supreme] court, though, is this: Did Congress overstep its constitutional power in 2006 by reauthorizing Section 5 of the act [Voting Rights Act of 1965], which requires states and localities with a history of discrimination to obtain federal permission before making changes to their voting procedures?

QUOTE: The law that sparked the outrage [among women in Afghanistan}... regulates the actions of women of the Shiite minority... Among the bill's many articles, activists point to a few particularly oppressive statutes: that women should get their husband's permission before leaving the house, and husbands have the right to have sex with their wives whenever they wish.

QUOTE: the predominantly Christian [Norway] nation is plagued by a religious dilemma over the right of a Muslim woman to wear a hijab as part of her police uniform. ...the controversy highlights the latent fears of a nonpluralistic society, where 91 percent belong to the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Norway.

QUOTE: Eric H. Holder Jr.'s swearing-in as the nation's first black attorney general and its top law enforcement official came weighted with heavy expectation that the system could change. Known as a prosecutor who was unflinchingly tough on crime, Holder, 58, is also a former civil rights lawyer who has mentored young black men. Many advocates view him as the best chance in decades to right what they consider unchecked racial injustice and insensitivity by federal officials.

QUOTE: As the U.S. military detention system here begins to come under Iraqi control, a complicated joint effort is underway to determine which of the men are safe to release and which may be insurgents. "Most of the people they detain are innocent," said Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi.

QUOTE: A last-minute Bush administration plan to grant sweeping new protections to health care providers who oppose abortion and other procedures on religious or moral grounds has provoked a torrent of objections, including a strenuous protest from the government agency that enforces job discrimination laws.

QUOTE: "Some of the detainees haven't even seen their lawyers yet, there's incredibly complicated issues about access to evidence and discovery, and as we've seen with every single case to date, it's incredibly hard to move through a system that lacks established rules and precedent,"...That new system, set up by Congress's Military Commissions Act of 2006, so far has been entangled by numerous motions that challenge its fairness and constitutionality. Military officers presiding over the cases have had to make critical decisions on the fly, including some appealed to another new court created by the same legislation.

QUOTE: The Supreme Court today upheld the constitutionality of execution by lethal injection in Kentucky, rejecting claims that the procedure amounts to cruel and unusual punishment and clearing the way for a resumption of executions in states that were awaiting the court's decision.

QUOTE: ...[a] Georgetown couple is convinced that their names are not being removed from the city's child protection registry largely because of the District's embarrassment over the Jacks case. The parents believe the city was right to suspect abuse, right to investigate, right to run tests. But they say the case went off the rails when city lawyers continued to press abuse allegations even after the judge found no cause to proceed.

QUOTE: “Excluding people from so many places and certain places could violate their fundamental rights,” [a Boston law professor says]. “The idea of identifying some public spaces as off-limits to people who are registered sex offenders because there are children in them, like libraries, is potentially unlimited.”

QUOTE: Earlier this week, [a lesbian couple] filed a motion with the court claiming that Amendment 43, which defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman, violated their constitutional right to equal protection.

QUOTE: Supporters of [the voter ID] policy argue that...election fraud will be reduced. Opponents of an ID requirement fear it will disenfranchise voters, especially the poor, members of minority groups and the elderly, who are less likely than other voters to have suitable identification.

QUOTE: defenders of racial preferences, such as the politicians who administer and benefit from Missouri's racial spoils system. The crux of the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative (MoCRI) would amend that state's constitution to say: "The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting."

QUOTE: Saud Mokhtar al-Hashemi...was among 10 men arrested last February and accused of illegally collecting funds and sending fighters to Iraq. His lawyer and supporters say the detentions were a government attempt to silence demands for democratic reform in Saudi Arabia.

QUOTE: The editor of a Brazilian community newspaper who said he was detained by the police in September sued the [New York] Police Department on Wednesday, saying that his rights were violated when officers demanded that he hand over photographs of a crime scene and handcuffed him to a bench when he refused.

QUOTE: The Senate yesterday began debating whether to grant legal immunity to telephone companies for assisting in warrantless wiretaps of terrorism suspects, with Democrats divided and their leadership pleading with the White House for more time to consider the issue.

QUOTE: The attempt to arrest the reporter was an uncomfortable reminder of the degree to which local Communist Party officials and their police, in the absence of an independent judicial system, routinely exercise power without legal restraints.

QUOTE: A plan by the counterterrorism bureau of the Los Angeles Police Department to create a map detailing the Muslim communities in that city, an effort described as a step toward thwarting radicalization, has angered civil rights groups, which say it is no better than racial profiling.

QUOTE: As tens of thousands of apartments and condos go smoke-free, a new battle is opening in the nation's decades-long fight over tobacco. Smoking bans have spread from workplaces to restaurants, bars, parks, ATM lines, cars with kids and now private residences.

QUOTE: The fight about the disclosure is becoming one of the central legal confrontations over Guantánamo, displaying the government’s national security concerns and the claims of detainees’ advocates that officials have repeatedly fended off critics by asserting that much of the information about the detainees cannot be publicly revealed.

QUOTE: The difficulties investigators have had in obtaining the authorization from a judge to arrest them highlights a broader debate about the tradeoff between civil liberties and security, one that is particularly fraught in Germany, given its 20th century history.

QUOTE: The U.S. Coast Guard used force to secure waters around the harbor where swimmers and surfers created a human blockade that had prevented the Superferry's 350-foot-long vessel, the Alakai, from entering the harbor.

QUOTE: A White House manual that came to light recently gives presidential advance staffers extensive instructions in the art of "deterring potential protestors" from President Bush's public appearances around the country.

QUOTE: An Israeli human rights group charged Tuesday that Israel has used concrete barricades, fences, checkpoints and other measures to impose restrictions on Palestinian movement in the West Bank that are "unprecedented in scope and duration."

QUOTE: The President's Intelligence Oversight Board… is obligated under a 26-year-old executive order to tell the attorney general and the president about any intelligence activities it believes "may be unlawful." The board was vacant for the first two years of the Bush administration.

QUOTE: [a US Court of Appeals] said a fundamental principle is at stake: military detention of someone who had lawfully entered the United States and established connections here, it said, violates the Constitution.

QUOTE: The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that parents of disabled children do not have to hire lawyers to sue school districts when they attempt to ensure that their children's special needs are adequately met.

QUOTE: Attorney General John D. Ashcroft lay ill in an intensive-care unit, his deputy, James B. Comey, received an urgent call. White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and President Bush's chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., were on their way to the hospital to persuade Ashcroft to reauthorize Bush's domestic surveillance program, which the Justice Department had just determined was illegal.

QUOTE: The suit was brought by two California fair housing groups that objected to postings on the matching service, Roommate.com. The groups said the site violated the Fair Housing Act by allowing and encouraging its users to post notices expressing preferences for roommates based on sex, race, religion and sexual orientation.

QUOTE: The October incident sparked outrage among civil libertarians, Muslim-Americans, and others who thought it was un-American for five US citizens and a legal resident, who'd all been thoroughly screened by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), to be suddenly taken off the plane as it sat at the gate because their behavior and Middle Eastern appearance frightened a few passengers.

QUOTE: It's not simply that the detainees have fewer and fewer rights. It's become almost impossible to determine what rights they do have, beyond the right to wait for some vestigial other right to be snatched away.

QUOTE: THESE WORKERS WIELD A POTENT WEAPON: They can force companies to prove in court that there was a legitimate business reason for their termination. And once a case is in court, it's expensive. A company can easily spend $100,000 to get a meritless lawsuit tossed out before trial. And if a case goes to a jury, the fees skyrocket to $300,000, and often much higher. The result: Many companies today are gripped by a fear of firing. Terrified of lawsuits, they let unproductive employees linger, lay off coveted workers while retaining less valuable ones, and pay severance to screwups and even crooks in exchange for promises that they won't sue.

QUOTE: The bill would also prevent the executive branch from making blanket determinations about who is an enemy combatant and would restrict the president's authority to interpret when certain human rights standards apply to detainees. The legislation would limit the label "enemy combatant" to a person "who directly participates in hostilities in a zone of active combat against the United States" or who took part in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

QUOTE: Under the cloak of setting up military tribunals to try al-Qaeda suspects and other so-called “unlawful enemy combatants,” Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress effectively created a parallel legal system for “any person” – American citizen or otherwise – who crosses some ill-defined line...Attorney General Gonzales doesn’t even believe that the Constitution grants them habeas corpus rights to a fair trial.

QUOTE: Privacy advocates yesterday called on the federal government to scrap a Department of Homeland Security data-mining program designed to create terrorism risk assessments for every traveler who enters or leaves the United States.

QUOTE: Do civil liberties cling to our belief system only by custom...Well, it depends on what you mean by civil liberties. Blair argues, as did American conservatives in the wake of the Warren Court, that certain legal protections, particularly for accused criminals, are overly punctilious, and damaging to law enforcement.

QUOTE: passengers singled out solely because of their behavior have at times been threatened with detention if they did not cooperate, raising constitutional issues...Some civil liberties experts said that the program...could turn into another version of racial profiling.

QUOTE: Las Vegas, whose homeless population has doubled in the past decade to about 12,000 people in and around the city, joins several other cities across the country that have adopted or considered ordinances limiting the distribution of charitable meals in parks.

QUOTE: The Senate passed legislation Tuesday that would make it a federal crime to help an under-age girl escape parental notification laws by crossing state lines to obtain an abortion...could result in criminal charges against close relatives or clergy members who interceded to help in a time of personal crisis.

QUOTE: Hoping to convince Congress to pass legislation to deprive detainees at Guantanamo of internationally-recognized rights, Bush Administration officials and allies...put forward a series of arguments, many having little basis in fact.

QUOTE: The parents argue, in papers filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, that the ban is so broad and blunt that it violates their constitutional right as parents to keep their children safe and to raise them in the way they see fit.

QUOTE: For the second time, a judge has blocked a Republican-sponsored effort to require Georgia voters to present government-issued photo identification cards before they can cast a ballot.The judge...said the requirement violated the State Constitution by placing an undue burden on the fundamental right to vote.

QUOTE: Private housing developers are joining a surging number of communities that are telling convicted sex offenders who need a place to live: "Not in my backyard."...Banning sex offenders from private property does not violate the Fair Housing Act, but restrictions by states and cities are worrisome...